Overview
The mission of QurAlis is to cure ALS using precision medicine. ALS is a destructive disease which causes muscle paralysis through degeneration of the motor system. An ALS diagnosis is a death sentence to patients, with a predicted life expectancy of about 3 years following diagnosis. ALS can affect anyone.
Harvard professors Kevin Eggan and Clifford Woolf, two pioneers in stem cell technology and translational ALS research, have worked to understand and combat the effects of ALS using stem cell technology. Together, they successfully used stem cells from ALS patients for the identification of a potential new therapeutic for ALS, (retigabine), which is now being tested in a clinical trial. Together with Dr. Kasper Roet and Q-State Biosciences, they co-founded QurAlis to bring more of their discoveries to ALS patients.
Like cancer, ALS is not one disease but a collection of different diseases with the same outcome. QurAlis has three founded programs to develop therapies for three different forms of ALS, for which the disease mechanism is known. Each program is extraordinary in its own way and demonstrates the degree of innovation and novelty that QurAlis brings to the forefront of ALS medicine. The QurAlis interventions include: A transformative device to remove toxic proteins from ALS patients, a drug that mediates overactive neurons to prevent them from dying, and a drug that restores a dysfunctional waste clearance system in cells. Success in one of these prospective therapies will have an unmeasurable impact on ALS patients and their families and directly translates into a success for QurAlis.
QurAlis has brought the very best academic scientists, clinicians, and industry leaders together in the company’s management team and advisory board. As a result, the QurAlis programs benefit from a collected broad understanding of the disease, a unique and proprietary ALS patient derived stem cell technology platform, a well designed clinical strategy and a structure based drug design approach that brought the first therapy for HIV.
ALS can be cured; precision medicine is the key!